


Last Fierce Touch

by ivyspinners



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Burns, F/M, No Touching Allowed, Post-Battle of Scarif, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 14:13:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12936990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyspinners/pseuds/ivyspinners
Summary: As it turns out, burns patients aren't supposed to touch anything for several weeks, at least until their skin heals over.Cassian finds this more challenging than he expected.





	Last Fierce Touch

It’s hardest during the night.

Sometimes, her breathing is silent, obscured by the air filter humming, and he wakes with a thundering heart, certain that she’s gone in one way or another and he’s alone on the beach, knees pressed into the sand as death approaches swifter than sound–

Once he gathers himself enough to reach the very borders of his space, it still takes a few second to check the rise and fall of her chest.

Sometimes, it’s the opposite. She wakes him up instead, a low moan that would pass unnoticed if he were less cautious about – well, everything. (Her, in particular.) She doesn’t thrash during nightmares; it’s just that tiny _sound_ that carves out his heart, because he can’t–

“Jyn,” he murmurs then, and it’s a mark of the whole damn situation that it takes a few repeats to wake her up.

There’s a clear ten feet of space between them, demarcated by a thick stripe of yellow. Best practice recommends separate rooms, but the medics gave up after the first three days, and moved them in together. Easier to put his presence to use than to use restraints on raw, exposed flesh when Jyn _reacted_ to a threat. There’s a scarcity of rooms anyway.

He’s not allowed to feel her heart beating beneath a palm, but here, he can measure her every breath on waking, after drowning in corpse-filled nightmares where he _couldn’t_.

During the day, such as can be measured on a hospital ship gliding through space, boredom sets in. They’re both smothered in wraps soaked in moisturiser and painkillers ( _easier to do it while you’re awake, if you think we’re attacking you while you’re sleeping_ ). The ceiling has two hundred and thirty-six tiles, Cassian counts during a particularly bad hour.

“Two hundred and fifty,” Jyn rasps from across the room, voice ravaged by smoke. After a few days of shared confinement, it has grown familiar too, in waking and in dreams.

“Those are cracks, not separate tiles.” He cranes his neck to watch her, and she doesn’t smile, but there’s a twitch in her face that might be amusement. He wishes he could trace the movement. “I could really use a datapad right now,” he admits.

“Might be worth the feeling of my fingers falling off,” she agrees. “Through not it actually happening.”

(He’s been injured before. But never in a way that needed a sterile room, with sterile equipment, unable to _touch_ anyone in case infection set in. Any _thing_ , he corrects mentally, to do something _productive_. Bacta, it turned out, was more expensive than time and space to recover, despite a growing chain of smugglers, so time and space it was. He just wishes it was less of both.)

He coughs when he laughs – brief, smothered, and when he glances back, he catches Jyn a moment before she looks away, her eyes wide. A flush creeps up her right cheek, where her skin is healthy–just like _his_. Their faces had been pressed together, a last, fierce touch at the end of the world, protected from fire and radiation.

She’s still staring at the ceiling as she says, “I’m glad you’re… it could be worse.”

 _I’m glad you’re alive_. It’s a gentle warmth uncurling in his chest, so different from the way his skin alternately stings and flares, burning, the way his IV line aches, dull.

“The company could definitely be worse,” he says. _I’m glad you’re here_.

Jyn is definitely smiling this time, even though she does not watch him, and sometimes this is the hardest: happiness instead of fear, and he can’t even brush her bare skin in shared affirmation that they’re alive. Hunger twists in his belly, much sharper while he’s awake and aware, shifting under his skin.

If he could put a finger on her pulse, that would be enough.

(He wants more, but that would be enough.)

**Author's Note:**

> and then jyn charms a trainee medic to get them disposable clean gloves and the feeling of skin through 0.45cm of latex is _too much_ for them both


End file.
